Snakes

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SNAKES slithered onto the scene over 100 MYA. True snakes do not have any legs, ears, eye-lids or a nose. What the snake lacks for limbs, it makes up for in bones. Snakes have more bones than any other animal on Earth, with a skull that is not fused like ours.

The snake can separate its skull in order to ingest large food items.
Giant Anaconda Skin Stokes Mystery of Maine’s Elusive 'Wessie'
A snakeskin found on a picturesque riverbank in the northeast United States belongs to an anaconda—the latest twist in the baffling story of “Wessie,” a supposedly enormous snake that has become a local legend in the town of Westbrook, Maine.

Sightings of the snake began in June, when a woman filed a report with the Westbrook police department claiming to have seen a snake as large as a truck, with a head the size of a basketball. Soon thereafter, a late-shift police officer patrolling near the first sighting saw a large snake eating a mammal, possibly a beaver. And on August 20, a man walking along the Presumpscot River stumbled across the molted skin of a 12-foot-long snake, near the other two sightings.

With each sighting, the mystery deepened—and the local community’s fascination with its strange new mascot grew. Clothing stores began selling Wessie-themed shirts. “It was pretty unexpected, I’ll tell you that,” Palcyk said to Steve Annear of the Boston Globe. Whither Did It Slither?
SERPENS by Guido Mocafico. Serpents﻿ In Genesis 3:1-5 it is the serpent’s power that leads Eve to disobey God’s command and consequently cause the downfall of man and thus expulsion from the garden of Eden.

The original tempter of Eve the temptress, the serpent has come to represent desire, lust and ultimately evil. Regardless of ones position on women’s rights and religion, the serpent is one of the oldest mythological symbols in a variety of historical contexts. ‘More wise than any beast of the field’, as the bible describes, the serpents strength and consequently power over human kind provides this cold-blooded creature a position of greatness and respect.

They can kill with just one venomous bite: the serpent has come to represent the dual nature of good and evil, life and death.
A Snake With A Single Foot Discovered In China. Most Venomous Snakes. Venomous Snakes Common Cobra Death Adder King Brown Snake Prairie Rattlesnake When discussing lists of the world’s deadliest snakes, most people use just one criterion and do not to take into account other significant factors.

As a result, many Top 10 lists tend to be inaccurate or, at the very least, skewed. These lists are usually based solely on the toxicity of snake venoms; however, there are also people who focus their "deadliest snakes" lists on snake bite deaths in the countries in which they live or study, or are just fond of. Taking the most significant factors into account, we have created a more relevant, and hopefully more objective, list of the world’s most deadly snakes.

Average size of an adult snake of this species. Loading... Click a column heading to sort the listings.
Garter Snakes in Idaho home. Catch of the Day. Gaboon Adder vs. Rat. Snake Eye. Snake skeleton [more bones than any other animal!]
A snake skeleton consists primarily of the skull, vertebrae, and ribs, with only vestigial remnants of the limbs.

Skull[edit] The skull of a snake is a very complex structure, with numerous joints to allow the snake to swallow prey far larger than its head. The prefrontal bone is situated, on each side, between the frontal bone and the maxilla, and may or may not be in contact with the nasal bone. The premaxillary bone is single and small, and as a rule connected with the maxillary only by ligament.

The paired vomer is narrow.
This snake’s venom makes you bleed from every orifice until you die. Spiny, Venomous New Sea Snake Discovered. A new species of venomous sea snake mysteriously covered head to tail in spiny scales has been discovered in treacherous seas off northern Australia, a new study says. Though some other sea snakes have spiky scales on their bellies, "no other [known] sea snake has this curious feature," study leader Kanishka Ukuwela, an ecologist at the University of Adelaide, said by email.

Normally snakes have smooth scales, but each of the newly named Hydrophis donaldi's scales has a spiny projection, he said. Scientists cruising shallow seagrass beds in the Gulf of Carpentaria (map) recently captured nine of the rough-scaled reptiles.
Evolution’s Most Effective Killer: Snake Venom. View Photo Gallery As predators, snakes are missing a few key attributes.

They have no legs to chase down their prey, no paws to knock down quarry, and no claws to hold their victims. But none of these deficiencies matters much, because evolution has handed snakes the ultimate weapon: venom. With it, the several hundred types of venomous snakes can kill or debilitate before their victims escape. Their venom has given snakes the ability to be small yet effective hunters, and they have spread to fill every ecological niche—as long as the environment is warm enough for them to stay in motion.

In general, scientists agree on how snakes' venom glands evolved, but that's not the case for the poisons themselves.
Feeding a Two-Headed Snake.